Invitational – exhibition now open

Our Invitational remains open until January 4 2018. This exhibition features work by art.earth members and friends with a focus on artists whose work celebrates and sometimes mourns for the precious planet on which we all live. The work in this exhibition sings a common refrain using a wide variety of media, styles, and approaches to making work.

There is no Reception for this exhibition. Instead, we invite you to join us on December 1st for our First Friday gathering and be amongst the first to see the work we have gathered here. Come for 1pm and bring something to share for lunch.

Francesa Owen (read bio) paintings are made using earth pigments locally gathered in North Devon. The pigments are made into paint using traditional paint-making techniques with a linseed oil binder. The frame is hand-made and is also painted with earth pigments – the intensity of its black so much deeper than any commercial paint. Teresa Pemberton’s work may have superficial similarities, but the impetus is as different as the work itself when looked at side-by-side. Her interest in coastal landscape and moors ripe with archeology has sustained her painting and she has taken pleasure in being able to immerse herself in the nature found here whilst using her passion for colour and surface to consider nature in a more reflective than mimetic way.

Janey Hunt’s (read bio) drawings are almost ghostly, shimmering from the page with a melancholy, muted colours drawing us ever-deeper into these fields and farmland. One image has striking bold lines outlining field structures, whilst her other image remains soft, blurred, and gestural.

Tessa Grundon’s work (read bio) is, like all the work in this exhibition, rooted in place, referencing a range of influences from the topography and history of a place and its ever-changing environment; the shifting tides to the effect of man on community and the landscape; to man himself and the shared visual language of natural forms.She uses local maps, beeswax from nearby hives (literally a distillation and essence of a place and a moment in time); pigments drawn from the mud, various coloured earths, vegetation, rust and charcoal. This work is a literal abstraction and extraction of the landscapes whose stories it tells.

Jan O’Highway (read bio) and Michèle Lazenby are both using forms of light capture to work with flowers and plants. Both, coincidentally, have chosen to represent the nasturtium in this exhibition, but by very different means. Jan uses a digital scanner quite literally to digitise the living plants and organisms that find their way by accident onto her canvas. There is extraordinary and surprising depth to these images, one of which is blown up far beyond life size. Michèle’s work, on other hand, is ghostly, almost impossible to grasp. She calls this work ‘Vessels of Light’, and uses a direct contact photographic process to explore how plants communicate and express their individuality, transforming light into growth, drawing in space. Each unique lumen print contains the image and physical trace of plants produced by a transfer of physical material (fluids, energy, cells) during an extended exposure in sunlight. Familiar everyday garden specimens were used, each individual plant expressing itself in its own unique way as it gradually changed form, releasing energy, re-entering the cycle of energy that sustains all life.

None of this work is explicit in its call for survival of our endangered and fragile planet. And yet the call sings loud and long in this work.